Right now it is a time of big shifts happening. Last month, I was invited to be in a fashion show by RAW Arts. It was the first time I’ve ever done a fashion show, so I came up with some fun new designs for it – along with a new logo, a new everything.

I almost wasn’t able to do the runway portion, because I don’t really know anyone in LA, so I had no models at first. Luckily at the last minute, by the grace of God, I was able to pull a group of three girls plus me. So THANK you to my friends Sarah, Ris, and Destiny!! They saved the show. I never actually intended to be a model myself, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. The song we walked to was the Ice Queen remix! It’s kinda crazy, I modeled in a fashion show wearing clothes I designed while music I wrote played in the background! Me and the girls had a ton of fun doing it, check out the official photos from it here!

Plus Sizes are now in the shop!

IN OTHER NEWS, I think everyone should have access to cute clothes no matter their size. Lots of people have been asking me for larger sizes, and I’ve always wanted to offer them, but for a long time I was unable to find a supplier who could make my designs in bigger sizes. Well good news everyone, I finally found a way to make it happen! Now pretty much all the clothes in my shop can be ordered in sizes up to 3X.

Birthday Sale

One last thing – this month it’s my birthday! I’ll probably make another post about that later, but in the meantime, I’m celebrating by offering 20% off everything in my etsy store – just use the code EATCAKE888 when you go to check out!

Lots of gurus & ‪‎spiritual teachers say “Follow Your Bliss”, but if you’ve ever tried you know it is much easier said than done. A lot of times, depending on your life’s circumstances, it seems literally impossible to follow your bliss. In this ‪vlog I talk about how a seemingly minor event at the gym shifted my perspective on the supposed impossibility following your bliss.

In this week’s episode of The Drunken Metaphysical podcast, I’m a guest! I read cards for Ginny and Curt, and drunkenly discuss what tarot cards, oracle cards, and angel cards are. The deck I use in this episode is the Hanson-Roberts Tarot Deck.

If you’ve had your eyes on my facebook page you may have seen I recently revived my vlog YouTube channel and posted some vlogs about my fitness adventures with the app ClassPass. In this vlog series (above), I talk about trying the app for two weeks.

Since I have continued to use the app, I have fulfilled my goal of exercising every day. So far I have worked out for every day of this year 2016, and best of all I have found ways to have fun while doing it. A lot of times (almost every day), I get to take two classes in one day.

Disclaimer: I am not being paid by ClassPass to write this review. I am writing this because I genuinely love this app and feel that it changed my life for the better. It does include affiliate links though.

What is ClassPass?

ClassPass is an app that, for a monthly fee ($120), allows you to to go unlimited fitness classes at any of the gyms or fitness studios in your area that accept ClassPass, up to 3 classes per studio per month. In Los Angeles where I live, most places accept bookings through ClassPass so there is a wealth of classes I can take.

Since I started using it, it has completely changed the way I think about fitness. I’m totally addicted to taking classes and I don’t see myself getting tired of it any time soon! Below are the 5 things I love about it the most.

Earth’s Power Yoga in Hollywood

1. I discovered kundalini yoga

This is the thing I am most grateful for. Yoga teacher SuzE Q describes Kundalini yoga as “going to the gym, therapy, and church all in one”, and I couldn’t agree more. As soon as I saw it on ClassPass I was curious about it. It’s now my absolute favorite type of yoga and I want to take the KRI Yoga Teacher Training this summer.

Me trying Pole Dance at Allure Dance Studio in Los Angeles

2. I found fitness studios in my neighborhood.

As some of you might already know, I recently moved from Boston to Los Angeles. I only had a chance to visit LA once before moving here, and I chose to live in East Hollywood simply because it was the easiest place to find an apartment. So I really didn’t know anything about my neighborhood.

ClassPass allows you to search by distance, and using that function I found four studios that are within walking distance of my apartment. 2 yoga studios, a spinning studio, and an aerial fitness studio! It sounds silly but being able to walk to the place where I work out is awesome.

The Yogi Tree in Toluca Lake

3. I’ve found a way to make exercise fun!

I know this is such a key to successfully reaching fitness goals, but I never really was able to crack the code on this one. In the past, the only exercise I seemed to genuinely enjoy was lifting weights and sometimes spinning. I’ve tried a lot of different home based workouts and found most of them barely tolerable, but I forced myself to keep doing them because I wanted the health benefits. With ClassPass I’ve found lots of work outs that I actually think are fun and not such a chore to go through.

Pink Iron women’s only gym in West Hollywood

4. I don’t have to be tied to one studio

This is something that other people may not enjoy, but I do. I find that most people have “their” gym or “their” yoga studio that they are loyal to and go to all the time, maybe because it’s close to where they live, maybe for other reasons I don’t understand.

Personally I couldn’t imagine being happy with going to one place all the time. I love the freedom of trying a wide variety of workouts. For example, I love yoga but I also like doing a wide variety of styles of yoga (kundalini, vinyasa, hatha, restorative, hot yoga, yoga booty ballet…). Most yoga studios only offer one or two types. There are none that offer EVERY type, although Yogala in Echo Park comes close. With ClassPass, I don’t have to waste time looking for a gym that has it all or offers everything I want – I can just take all the different types of classes I want, when I want to take them.

Me doing Flying Pilates at Crunch Gym in WeHo

5. I’ve discovered new types of exercise that I love

The beauty of having ClassPass in a city like LA is there’s a huge wealth of fitness studios here, including some that offer pretty unique classes. In the 2 months since I started using it I’ve had a chance to try so many new things I’ve never tried before, and some I’d never heard of before: Barre, Power Plate, Flying Pilates, Pole Dancing, Buti Yoga, and there are even lifting classes. I’ve also discovered the beauty of taking classes with a group (rather than going it alone at home or a gym) – it’s awesome to be able to get tips on form and see familiar faces at each class.

I’m going to be honest here – for most of my life I’ve been skeptical of energy work.

I have disregarded qijong, reiki, and other energy healing modalities as basically a bunch of new age BS, despite the fact that I’m well aware of the validity of other similar new age practices. I had no experience whatsoever to base this opinion on, I simply had always been told that it was nonsense so I always believed it was nonsense. Being healed by someone moving their hands over your body? Yeah ok.

Fast forward to a little under a year ago, when I called into Doreen Virtue’s radio show on Hay House Radio. For those who don’t know, Doreen is an extremely successful author of metaphysical books and the creator of an alternative to traditional tarot cards called angel oracle cards.

I asked Doreen for guidance about a few things I was struggling with at the time. She gave me an extremely accurate reading and sage advice. Doreen gives gifts to everyone who calls in, and she was really excited to give me a few.

One of the gifts she gave me was her Certified Angel Card Reader course and a deck of her Angel Tarot Cards. She also gave me a copy of her book Angels of Abundance. At the time, I had done tarot in the past, but abandoned the practice. I was a little skeptical of angel cards as well, but decided to take the course anyway.

To my surprise, I found angel cards much easier to work with than tarot cards and astonishingly accurate. I started doing a reading for myself every day, and eventually moved on to doing readings for others. After a while, I started giving readings at parties.

One card that came up over and over again for me was the energy work card. I shrugged it off, and didn’t think too much of it at the time. The holistic health studio I go to for my weekly meditation group, Essence of Healing, offers reiki, so I had many opportunities to try it, I just never did. Like many people, I’m hesitant to treat myself to anything.

For Christmas, my brother got me Kyle Gray’s Angel Prayers Oracle Cards. So of course I gave myself a reading that same day, asking the same question I always ask. Again, I got a message about energy work. I decided on that day I was going to try reiki.

Not long after I made that decision, I discovered Essence of Healing was doing a Usui Reiki I training course in early January. I had not previously thought of becoming a reiki practitioner, but I figured it was a good opportunity to learn about it.

During the class, I learned about the history of reiki, heard some first hand accounts of how life changing it can be, and received reiki healing from the other student in the class. Still, I felt like I was experiencing the class through the lens of skepticism. Even though I could see it worked for others, I still didn’t necessarily believe it could help me. I left the class worrying that reiki didn’t work on me, and that I had wasted my time and money.

It wasn’t until a few hours later that I noticed the difference.

After class, I went food shopping and then I went home.

At home, when I looked around my room, it was like I was looking at it through new eyes. I suddenly wondered how anyone could live here. It was in a cluttered, dirty state from months of neglect, but I had never really noticed it up until that point. After receiving reiki, It was actually physically difficult for me to breathe in such a space.

I felt immediately that I had to clear it out from top to bottom. I removed all the rubbish, cleaned out my closet, reorganized my craft supplies, and trashed or donated anything that I didn’t really need. I put together a shelving unit I had previously been too lazy to put up, and even reorganized my shoes. Once I was done cleaning, I felt like the room doubled in size.

Normally, a cleaning project of this magnitude would be a hugely draining, day-long task for me (because, spoiler alert, I don’t like cleaning and have to force myself to do it). This time, however, I wasn’t even really thinking about it – it seemed effortless, and it was done in one Sunday evening.

The miracles continued the next day at work.

At the time that I took reiki I, I had a (soul crushing) day job in customer service. Since the beginning of my employment there, I had been sharing a small makeshift workspace with 3 coworkers, made up of three tables pushed together. The day after my reiki class, in the middle of a normal Monday, a work crew interrupted our workday to take away the tables and install real cubicles. I felt as though my energy coming into my workplace was what caused this to happen. After the cubicles were installed, I had so much more space at my day job as well.

Later on, as I drove from my day job to my teaching job, I felt as though I was seeing the rest of the world through new eyes as well. I was able to enjoy the sun, and the way the leaves looked as they were blowing in the wind. I was able to see the beauty in simple things that I had been completely blind to before.

In the months that followed, I continued to practice reiki on myself and others. Shortly after that first reiki treatment, I realized that there was no room in my life for the day job either. After 2.5 months of consistent self-healing (reiki, affirmations, shadow work, and meditation), I was able to quit the day job to focus on HAVING A LIFE AGAIN and doing the work that is really important to me. I don’t think reiki was the only thing that caused this chain of events, because I did a lot of other inner work as well. I can’t help but think, however, that reiki was the catalyst for it.

In retrospect I can see that the external state of my room and workplace was a physical manifestation of the internal energetic blockages I had lived with up until that point. Receiving reiki had cleared the blockages out, and as a result my external circumstances “cleared out” as well.

Before I discovered reiki, I often used to lament that I felt as though my brain didn’t work right. I seemed to always be struggling to enjoy virtually any aspect of my life, and my energy was very unfocused. Now I realize my brain is fine, it was just cluttered, and receiving reiki has cleared it out more than anything I had tried before – including meditation.

Energy work doesn’t remove the need for other spiritual practices, such as shadow work or self-love. But it can clear away our own stubborn resistance to healing.

Everything you read about angels states that when you’re in a state of gratitude, your angels rejoice and dance around. If you’re like me, you’ve heard countless people say that practicing gratitude is good for your wellbeing, good for manifesting money, good for stress relief, and all this other stuff. Gratitude is touted as the key to undoing all the bad things in your life, especially financial problems.

Despite all this, I admit, the “practice of gratitude” is something I’ve always had trouble with. Whenever I sit down to use my gratitude journal, I don’t feel genuine appreciation for the air that I breathe or the roof over my head or whatever the hell else people tell you you’re supposed to be grateful for every day. It just feels more like I’m trying to remember what gratitude feels like than actually being in a state of appreciation for those things. Additionally, I find it really hard to appreciate things like the air I breathe when it seems like I’m struggling so much in so many different areas. Even still, like a lot of people, I used my gratitude journal almost every day in an attempt to feel less shitty about the current state of my life (because let’s be real, that is the only reason I used it). My inability to focus on gratitude plagued me all the time. I could feel that writing in my gratitude journal wasn’t accomplishing anything.

The problem with gratitude is that it can’t be forced.

Or mustered up, or summoned for the purposes of igniting positive change in your life. When you try to, the appreciation isn’t genuine. You’re not grateful, you’re trying to be grateful.

Because of this, focusing on gratitude in this way will never lead to health or prosperity or joy, regardless of what most spiritual gurus say. This is why so many of us abandon the practice of gratitude.

So what is the real value of gratitude? Why does everyone make such a big deal about it? Is there actually a way to “practice” gratitude at all?

I didn’t really seek the answer to these questions, but the answers found me anyways.

The Christmas Miracle

This past Christmas, while I was making us some Christmas Day green juice, my boyfriend Ben went into the back yard to let the dog in. While he was there, he found a purple metal Lulu Lemon water bottle (above) that had been sitting in the back yard. He brought it in and said “is this your water bottle? It’s been in the backyard since at least your birthday party.”

I had never seen it before. My birthday is in August, so whoever had left it there clearly wasn’t coming back for it.

“It’s not mine,” I said with a shrug.

“Do you want it?” Ben asked. “I’ll wash it off for you.”

Again I shrugged in response to this. I never really carried around a water bottle because, although I drink 4 liters a day, I’ve never found a water bottle that I liked. I usually drink out of a mason jar with one of those straw lids (seriously). Bottles are always either too expensive, don’t hold enough water, made of plastic, just plain ugly, or some other thing. I had been given a plastic one with a straw in it as a gift a few months prior and never used it because the straw was weird and you had to suck really hard to get a sip of water and I didn’t like it. Also it was too small.

After Ben washed the water bottle for me, I started using it when I didn’t feel like dragging my mason jar around, and found that it was a lot easier to carry (duh). It fit in my car’s cupholders, and I could put my green juice in the jar and still have water in my bottle. Over time I started bringing it everywhere, and felt this new sense of relief because I never had to worry about having something to drink out of. I always had the water bottle with me.

My Moment in the Light

This past weekend I was with Ben. I got a new phone and we went grocery shopping. We took my car and I brought the water bottle with me.

As we pulled in the driveway of his place after we were done, I went to take a sip from the water bottle and, again, I felt relieved that I had the water bottle there. It was just so nice to have on hand.

When I was drinking, I suddenly noticed. Oh my god, I held genuine, not-mustered-up unbridled appreciation for something: the water bottle. It was SO utterly convenient, I loved it so much.

Ecstatic with this realization, I turned to my boyfriend, held the water bottle in the air, and practically screamed “HOLD ON, can I just say— I’m going to share something I’m grateful for because we never do that. I AM SO grateful for this water bottle. It is so fucking convenient and makes life so easy and it’s METAL and it was FREE! And YOU cleaned it up for me! Which is awesome because I would’ve totally been too lazy to! Having this water bottle has no joke improved the quality of my life. I love it so fucking much and it’s so fucking awesome!“

I felt like this was kind of a big deal on its own, but I had an even bigger revelation when I witnessed Ben’s response.

The Sudden Realization

Ben was elated (and a little shocked, in a good way) by my sudden outburst of appreciation. As he explained to me why he chose the water bottle, how it was only going to waste in the backyard, how he thought the phrase on it suited me, and so on, I was able to see the effect my gratitude had on him.

When I decided to share with him how grateful I was, I did it purely on an impulse. One thing I hadn’t anticipated was how it would make him feel when I expressed my gratitude.

He was overwhelmed with appreciation because I was so grateful for this thing he gave me.

I had been so busy trying to find things in my own life to be grateful for I had never even thought about the effect expressing my gratitude might have on others.

Then it occurred to me. I finally understood gratitude.

The truth about gratitude

Gratitude isn’t just about what you are grateful for. Gratitude is EVEN MORESO about expressing appreciation to others so that they can FEEL APPRECIATED.

Gratitude can’t be forced, which is why it’s important to take note of the things you’re grateful for when you’re already in a state of appreciation for them.

Other people seeing you in a state of gratitude inspires them, just as observing others in a state of gratitude can inspire you.

about adorpheus

I'm a musician and a cosplayer. I watch a lot of Star Trek and listen to a lot of Elliott Smith and eat a lot of chocolate. I mostly post about veganism, because being a vegan is pretty great. Sometimes I post about the other things I do. I was featured on MTV's True Life. Read more...